This invention relates to vascular repair devices, and in particular intravascular stents, which are adapted to be implanted into a patient's body lumen, such as a blood vessel or coronary artery, to maintain the lumen's patency. Stents are particularly useful in the treatment of atherosclerotic stenosis in various blood vessels, and are most frequently used in connection with coronary angioplasty.
Stents are generally cylindrical devices which hold open a segment of blood vessel or other body lumen. They also are suitable to support and hold back a dissected arterial lining that can occlude the lumen. At present, numerous commercial stents are marketed throughout the world. While some of these stents are flexible and have the appropriate strength rigidity needed to hold open a lumen, such as a coronary artery, each stent design typically represents a compromise between the stent's flexibility and its radial strength. What has been needed, and heretofore unavailable, is a stent which has a high degree of flexibility so that it can be advanced through tortuous lumen and readily expanded, and yet have the mechanical strength to hold open the lumen or artery into which it is implanted and provide adequate vessel wall coverage. The present invention satisfies this need. That is, the stent of the present invention has a high degree of flexibility, making it possible to advance the stent easily through tortuous body passageways, yet the stent has sufficient radial strength so that it can hold open that lumen or passageway or tack up a dissected lining and still provide adequate vessel wall coverage.